I've always loved books.
I'd love to write books.
Most of all I love books about the stuff I'm interested in, the stuff I'd like to do, make, create.
Reading books about the stuff I love makes me feel I've done the stuff I love.
Seeing the amazing accomplishments and the creativity fuels my own ambitions but, often, not enough to make me find the paints, the pencils, the paper, the yarn, the fabric, the tools.
I used to do the same with gardening, even with cooking. I have phases of reading cookery books like novels. I love the Ns, Nigel Slater for his descriptions and Nigella for her fancy-pants phrasing. She can make an oxo cube sound like just the right thing. I've just got Rose Prince's 'The English Table' from the library. I have (or my friend, who has borrowed it, has) her last book, 'The New English Kitchen' which, like, Masterchef for so many others...changed my life. How's that for a book?
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I went to see 'The Reader' last night. It was the second time in recent history that I'd planned a cinema trip with friends only to find that the proposed film, in this case 'Australia' was full or (embarassingly) on at a different cinema. The first time this happened we saw 'Brokeback Mountain'. It made me cry.
Last night 'The Reader' made me cry. It was so beautiful and so horrific. It was exhausting and strengthening. The film-makers had captured each period in its 50-odd year timeline perfectly. There was post-war Germany, flaking and covered in dust, being rebuilt and families swathed in knits (who made them?), and it moved seamlessly through the fashions and the buildings of the 60s and 70s through to the late 1990s. There wasn't a jarring moment and it was so naturalistic, it absorbed me into the story.
I wonder if we'll see 'Australia' next week? It was good to see the cinema so busy (cheap night, admittedly) and there seem to be so many films on that seem to be worth a look.
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